Some of us are old enough to remember senator Brian Gibson. He served as a senator for the Liberal Party from 1993 to 2002. Gibson had a ministry in the first term of the Howard government in 1996.
He was appointed a parliamentary secretary for the Treasury portfolio but there was an interest he held in an entity that was or was likely to be impacted by the decision-making processes he oversaw as a minister and so he lost the secretary role.
Gibson did not re-enter the Howard ministerial fold again and he exited parliamentary politics in 2002.
There are also people old enough to remember Labor stalwart Mick Young, who had to step down from a ministry in 1984 as a result of a Paddington Bear doll that made its way into the country in his wife’s luggage without it being declared.
He was later cleared by an inquiry.
These two examples might be ancient history for some but they are examples of ministerial responsibility taken seriously.
You could be forgiven for scratching your head and wondering whether those standards disappeared if you have been watching the robodebt royal commission, with former Liberal minister Alan Tudge yesterday flicking responsibility for the legality of the robodebt scheme back to the secretary of a department.
It can’t be a comfortable feeling watching or reading about the evidence being given by the various players in the royal commission if you are a public servant working in the social services machinery and getting the finger pointed back at you.
What must also be weird to observe if you have any longevity as a public servant, politician, political staffer, or journalist is to see the convention of ministerial responsibility gradually vanish in your lifetime.
This royal commission brings those issues back to the surface as public servants, ministerial staffers, and politicians themselves get quizzed within an inch of their life by the royal commissioner, Catherine Holmes, and counsel assisting, Justin Greggery.
Each day brings further confirmation that robodebt itself was an unlawful scheme, but that confirmation is unnecessary.
Federal Court judge Bernard Murphy gave the government a blast about the illegal scheme when he signed off on a settlement in June 2021.
Australians already knew this scheme was illegal, but the royal commission is drawing out how the system of government that handled these critical matters involving vulnerable people was morally disengaged, and, frankly, unethical.
The question that also ought to continue to bother observers of the royal commission is why, unlike in past eras, something like an illegal scheme that had the objective of chasing people for money they never owed failed in and of itself to cost ministers their jobs and sink any future aspirations for political advancement.
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